Editor’s
note:This feature is provided courtesy of the
Institute for Urban Design, New York City, Ann Ferebee, Director. For
information on the Institute, membership, and its upcoming fall 2005 programs,
please contact her at 212-353-2380, fax 212-353-2381, e-mail Aferebee@aol.com.

Shaping high density
residential environments is the most important issue before urban designers in
North America today. As the urban consequences of permanently higher energy
costs sets in, and as the benefits to urbanity of properly-managed high density
living become ever more evident, new debates are emerging, while old debates
are falling away.

The debate that is falling
away – quicker than one might have imagined, given its prominence in the
popular and professional press over the past 15 years – is that revival of late
19th century suburban ideals packaged as The New Urbanism. Better layouts for
walkable town hubs, an ongoing taste for the neo-classical, moderately-, even
nominally-increased housing densities – the shelf of curatives it offers misses
the real malaises of the contemporary city. It is ever more evident that “The
Old Suburbanism” is only a shuffling of deck chairs on top of our Titanic urban
issues.

The new debate about cities
centers on portions of two cities, the first being one of the oldest
metropolitan zones in North America, the other one of the newest. Lower
Manhattan is currently the most dynamic and interesting portion of New York,
now undergoing one of the periodic series of urban revivals it has experienced
since its founding by Amsterdam burghers and Jewish refugees from Recife. The
other site of intense scrutiny by urban designers these days is downtown
Vancouver, invented overnight two and one half centuries later as a land
promotion scheme by the Canadian Pacific Railway.

The clearest evidence of the
changing realities of city building is the fact that downtown Vancouver has
recently eclipsed Manhattan as North America’s highest density residential area.
But this may change again, as Downtown Manhattan is currently home to a high
density housing boom, much of it sparked by loan guarantees and direct
investment made available in the wake of the urban devastation of 9/11. The two
cities have adopted quite different institutional and urban design strategies
towards the same ends: the creation of livable, socially-mixed, high-density
neighborhoods with high level amenities that co-exist happily with conventional
downtown functions. And my title lies a bit; because it is not really
“Vancouverism Versus Lower Manhattanism,” but “Vancouverism Plus Lower
Manhattanism,” as there are ideas in both places that might well migrate
elsewhere.

VANCOUVERISM:

Social Bonus Zoning

Vancouver breaks all the
supposed rules of North American urbanism. In breaking them – while
simultaneously building equity, amenity, and livability – my city may now be writing
a new rulebook of city-making for the 21st century. The Vancouver that is now
generating such interest amongst planners and architects was shaped by a
complex interaction of geography, politics, principles, ideas, and contingency,
yet out of its particular history may come some fresh notions that might apply
elsewhere. “Vancouverism” has now become a term in the literature of city
planning, a cousin to that older descriptor of the hyper-dense city – “Manhattanism.”

A quick review of what sets
Vancouver apart. Concocted instantly in the late 1870s as a land promotion
scheme for the Canadian Pacific Railway, Vancouver is the continent’s youngest
major city – younger than Seattle and Denver, even Phoenix and Calgary. Always
a place of innovation in urban planning and housing design, Vancouver has seen
its downtown population double in the past 15 years. The continent’s youngest
major city with its highest residential density? – iron rule number one of
North American urbanism broken.

Politics In Transit

Broken rule two is just as
important. Vancouver is the only major city in North America without a single
freeway within its boundaries. Citizen activism in the late 1960s saved Gastown
and Chinatown by stopping a roadway with the Orwellian name of the “East
Downtown Penetrator,” followed by significant investment in elevated rail
public transit.

Rule three is that
Vancouver’s current planning decisions are almost entirely insulated from
interference by city councilors and mayor. This does not mean unbridled power
for planners (land use policy remains politically accountable), but it does
allow for decisions in the long-term interest of the city to often prevail over
the short-term needs of getting re-elected. Born of our geographic situation
wedged between mountains and sea, Vancouver has had a historical legacy of
relatively high-density living, taken to new heights by a political culture in
which more people per block is thought to be a positive nearly as often as
often as a negative.

Rule four has to do with one
of the urban forces most difficult to discuss: race. While having immigrant and
non-white population ratios comparable to New York, Toronto, and Los Angeles,
Vancouver has escaped many of the striations and frictions that come with
neighborhoods sorted by ethnicity. The shame of our city is not a racial
ghetto, but a chemical one: indeed, the Downtown Eastside is one of Vancouver’s
most multi-cultural, multi-racial neighborhoods, one linked by a culture and
economy of drug dependency. The Downtown Eastside’s tragedy may well have been
exaggerated by urban planning policies that have concentrated social housing
and front-line poverty agencies in this district as densely as condo towers are
concentrated only six or 10 blocks to the west.

Rule five has to do with the
role that developers have in providing the social, cultural, and recreation
infrastructure in new and renewed neighborhoods. For nearly 20 years, Vancouver
has used a form of social bonus zoning, in which extra density in housing
developments is granted in return for such public amenities as cultural
facilities, parks, schools, and social housing. After resisting it at first,
our development industry likes the current system, one where density is traded
for a better public realm, because they find such investments increase the
value of their projects.

Building Height and
Social Mix

The way was prepared for
Vancouver’s trading of building height and density for

public amenity in its social
bonus zoning by a tradition of the highest housing densities on the west coast.
The near-downtown neighborhood of the West End had Canada’s highest residential
densities by the 1960s, and an established development model of small floor
plate, mid-rise towers (small plates because the size of land assemblies were
limited due to public lanes running through all downtown blocks). The False
Creek South developments later that decade established some of the other
planning principles important to Vancouverism; a mix of income groups and modes
of housing tenure in dense neighborhoods with significant investment in parks,
sites for social housing, arts, and recreation facilities.

When the North Shore of
False Creek was developed in the late 1980s, these principles were applied at
significantly higher densities, and in Hong Kong-inspired small plate high-rise
towers, rather than the mid-rises constructed previously. In large part because
the 240-acre site of the former EXPO 86 was acquired at a very low net cost by
Hong Kong industrialist Li Ka Shing, significant public investments in the area
were extracted from his Concord Pacific Developments. Parks, the Roundhouse (a
neighborhood recreation and arts hub), public artworks, even an elementary
school were all funded – in the main – by the developer.

In the 1991 Downtown Plan
that soon followed, the social bonus zoning system was codified, it having been
established that Vancouverites – perhaps inspired by the wave of Hong Kongers
and Taiwanese then arriving in the prospect of the return of the Crown Colony
to China in 1997 – were not driven by typical North American squeamishness
about increased housing densities.

The same plan established
the small plate high rise tower on townhouse base typology that is the
architectural face of Vancouverism, along with the notion that developers, not
taxpayers, would help pay for public amenities in new districts, raising the
value of their constructions through a vibrant public realm. The same plan also
re-zoned a huge portion of the downtown peninsula as “housing optional,” but
which has since developed almost only as housing (more later on this worrisome
current “de-downtownization” of Vancouver).

Developing Public Amenity

Here is an example of how
the social bonus system works in application. For a double tower on townhouse
base project at Richards and Nelson Streets (in the Downtown South area almost
entirely re-zoned in 1991 from low-density light industrial to high-density
housing optional) that came to be called “The Mondrian,” Bosa Developments was
granted a bonus of about four extra stories of condos in exchange for a
significant public amenity, selected and managed by the City of Vancouver
through a development agreement.

This was raw space to be
provided in perpetuity to the city, which in turn leased the space to the
Contemporary Art Gallery, a highly regarded semi-public gallery analogous to
the New Museum in Manhattan. The neighborhood lost a little sky and light,
there are a few more deliveries and demands on local services, but the net
effect is a lively cultural institution provided without capital cost to the
public purse. Trading density for amenity is the Vancouver formula in a
nutshell.

The trouble with the
Vancouver system is that it only works for high growth cities, where the
economic returns from extra density permit the private sector to finance social
benefits with extra constructions for which there is a guaranteed market. It
also requires high degrees of European-style “statism” or more specifically,
dirigism – planners determining the form of buildings and the appropriate
public amenities.

Most Vancouver architects
resent the power exerted by the current downtown planning team, and the more
planners intervene on visual and design issues, the worse the result – aesthetically
most often, socially, sometimes. Thus Vancouver’s urban successes may well have
come at the price of architectural quality, innovation, even standards of
building finishes. Our best architects almost never get commissions downtown
(these go instead to low fee production houses. Architect James Cheng’s designs
– such as the Residences on Georgia (pictured) – are welcome exceptions to this
pattern. Only now, as the last 10% of downtown tower sites are being developed,
has architecture and quality of housing layout started to become a real factor
in a real estate marketplace, heretofore shaped by condominium apartments as a
generic commodity – like hog backs – ripe for speculation.

This planner’s paradise – Downtown
Vancouver – has exemplary urbanism, a lively social mix, and a high quality of
life, all of which make it ever more attractive as a “resort” for fluid
international capital seeking a temporary home and as a retirement zone for
baby boomers, and much less attractive as a place to conduct business. Downtown
Vancouver’s weaknesses (trading jobs for condos, taking third rate designs with
sometimes questionable “social benefits”) may yet overpower its strengths
(cosmopolitanism, dynamic social and ethnic mix, a glorious site).

LOWER MANHATTANISM:

Liberty Bonds as Housing
Catalyst

It is a surprising fact that
redevelopment of the core areas of American cities is dependent to a much
larger degree on federal government funding than in otherwise more social
democratic Canada. The American model is one of redevelopment agencies, special
tax relief zones, and direct public investment in urban regeneration. Money is
flung at American urban problems in the form of bond financing and direct subsidies
to private sector builders. Canadian urban redevelopment is much more
intermediated, slower, and distributed through narrowly-defined public domain
funds, such as the Vancouver Agreement – federal money which is investing in
the city’s troubled Downtown Eastside. Especially over the past five years,
Canada’s federal government has been investing far less per capita in cities
than that of the United States. Moreover, Canadian constitutional arrangements
mean that municipalities are unable to institute sales taxes and similar
revenue generators, and cannot issue bonds, a key means used by American cities
to raise capital for infrastructure.

To generalize broadly but
usefully, the key shaper of city building in Canada is city planning – understood
as a Utopian technocratic art performed by public agencies. The key shaper of
the American city is pragmatic funding programs – some of them direct
investments, others less visible allocations of public money to private
recipients, such as mortgage payment tax deductibility, a huge investment of
public funds unknown in Canada and most other countries.

These forces are evident in
the story of New York Liberty Bonds, which have sparked the current boom in
construction of rental housing in Lower Manhattan. These hastily devised
economic development instruments were designed to deal with an immediate and
unprecedented calamity – the aftermath of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, which
were led by architect and graduate student in urban design Mohammed Atta (his
thesis for a German university was about Islamic tradition versus modernity in
the urban development of Aleppo, Syria).

While Lower Manhattan has
not been a significant residential neighborhood since the late 19th century,
those apartments that remained there saw their occupancy rates plunge from 95%
to 65% in the months after the attacks, according to Tracy Paurowski of the New
York City Housing Development Corporation. The post 9/11 effect on retail
businesses and office space occupancy was – if anything – even more
devastating. For the southern tip of Manhattan, the United States Congress
authorized $8 billion for New York Liberty Bonds. As constitutionally required,
these funds were administered through the State of New York, half of the funds
allocated to flow through city agencies.

New Multi-Family Rentals

$1.6 billion of the bonds
were reserved to foster “new multifamily rental housing” in Lower Manhattan. To
put things in perspective, only 20% of Liberty Bonds are available for housing,
and this total is less than the $2 billion made available, for example, for
commercial projects outside of the “Liberty Zone” below Canal Street.

Then there was the difficult
issue of fostering affordable housing in Manhattan. There was a widespread
sentiment that the new funding stream should create rental housing for those
other than solely wealthy New Yorkers, but the nature of these bonds makes this
goal difficult. The state and city agencies selected to administer the Liberty
Bonds used different policies when contracting with developers for the $800
million each was allocated. For the New York State Housing Finance Agency,
there was a requirement that at least 5% of units be permanently reserved and
priced for New York families making no more than 150% of medium income – over
$90,000 for a family of four. Evidently, this is an “only in New York”
definition of affordability. To NYSHFA’s credit, these subsidized units are
distributed around apartment buildings, ensuring that no floor or portion is
stigmatized.

On the other hand, the New
York City Housing Development Corporation took a different strategy, which
charged developers receiving Liberty Bonds to pay a 3% origination fee, which
has to date generated a total of $15.3 million, used as 1% second mortgage
loans that have generated 394 apartments, all in the outer boroughs where land
and construction costs are lower.

The first to benefit from
NYCHDC Liberty Bond financing was a Battery Park North housing tower literally
devastated by debris from 9/11 while still under construction. According to
developer George Aridas of the Albanese Organization, Liberty Bond financing
when no other money was flowing to Lower Manhattan revived what might have
remained a contemporary ruin. The result was named the Solaire, the first LEED
Gold-certified housing tower in the United States. A second, equally “green”
tower called the Verdisian was financed by Liberty Bonds several years later,
with the same developer and architect (Cesar Pelli Associates were co-designers
for both), both towers have high quality architectural finishes and a
commitment to the conserver lifestyle nowhere to be found in the forest of
Vancouver towers.

There is no doubt that the
Liberty Bonds primed the pump for Lower Manhattan housing development when it
was most needed. A project like the Solaire was completed when it might have
been left fallow, and the Battery Park neighborhood is the better for it. As
housing decline shifted through 2004 and 2005 to housing boom, then housing
bubble, it is less apparent that later projects such as the Rockrose
Corporation’s high end, ultra-high-density 2 Gold Street tower would not have
proceeded, had it not been for Liberty Bonds. Although it could not have been
foreseen three years ago, the net effect of Liberty Bonds for the last few
projects okayed (in spring of 2005) is to increase profit to developers, with
modest public amenity in the form of a truly nominal number of lower-cost
apartments for median or better income Manhattanites.

SHARED CONCLUSIONS

The urban design strategies
used to foster socially mixed high density housing in Lower Manhattan and
Vancouver are sufficiently unique to their particularities in time and space to
limit their application to those cities without thriving cores and
attractiveness to global investors and high skill/income new residents. Of
wider interest is the bell-weather function these two cities provide.

The most telling of these
shared experiences is how housing (especially condominium apartments, with up
to half now bought as speculative investments) is currently trumping
traditional dedicated office functions in Manhattan and Vancouver’s downtown
peninsula. Nearly one third of the Lower Manhattan housing created through the
Liberty Bonds consists of converted office towers. This is but part of a much
bigger and alarming trend – the conversion of 8 million square feet of
commercial space into housing in New York over the past few years. This is more
square miles of offices than exists in total in all but a handful of American
downtown cores. To this has to be added the conversion of a half dozen large
Manhattan hotels into condos, the most prominent of these being the Plaza.

If anything, the situation
is more acute in Vancouver, which, unlike New York, is not a headquarters but a
government and services town in terms of its office space needs. No new office
tower has been proposed in years for downtown Vancouver, and with a growing
queue of applications to convert existing towers to housing, city council has
placed a temporary moratorium on further conversions, while the planning
department completes a study on long term space needs.

The riposte from the
development industry in New York and Vancouver is that office space
construction is cyclic, and when rental prices are right, a new wave of
construction will begin. The Economist magazine has described the
current housing boom as “the biggest speculative bubble in world history,” and
the bursting of temporary bubbles can create long-term problems, such as the
continuous annual decline of Japanese housing prices ever since their bubble
burst in 1991.

With the cancellation of
federal social housing programs in Canada and the United States over the past
two decades, it is now harder than ever to create social diversity in downtown
neighborhoods attractive to moneyed migrants, as in New York and Vancouver. Vancouver
planners have almost ritually required developers to give over portions of
their sites for social housing, but without federal funding programs to build
the actual buildings, they are selling the land and building instead in the
cheaper but poverty-stressed Downtown Eastside, much as the NYCHDC does. Lower
Manhattan and Vancouver’s downtown peninsula share a problem that most North
American cities would love to have – too much interest in new downtown housing.
It is important to look beyond the current housing bubble to ask whether the
wholesale exchange of offices for condos is in the long-term interests of the
economic health, even the urbanity and livability of these two cities.

For example, projections of
ridership for Vancouver’s latest rapid transit expansion predict more people
leaving downtown for the suburbs to work each morning than coming into the center,
leading to current calls by politicians on the right for Seattle-style
suburb-to-suburb freeways.

This is hardly the balanced
urbanism Vancouver planners would have us believe they have shaped, and it is
nonetheless a direct consequence of the ham-handed downtown re-zonings of 1991.
Vancouver and New York City must now plan with more subtlety and imagination,
less they trade their metropolitan status for new roles as pleasure zones for
the nomadic planetary rich – or just as bad – downtown Sun Cities for aging
Baby Boomers who seek a taste of urbanity in their new condos after lives spent
in the suburbs.

Currently
the architecture critic for The Vancouver Sun, Trevor Boddy has taught architectural and urban design, history, and
theory at the Universities of British Columbia, Oregon, Manitoba, and Toronto,
and lectures globally on contemporary design and cities. He has worked as an
urban designer for planning departments in Calgary and Edmonton, and consults
on urban spaces, historic preservation and architect selection processes across
Canada, the United States, and Hong Kong.

Boddy’s
independent critical monograph The Architecture of Douglas Cardinal, was
named “Alberta Book of the Year” and short-listed for the International Union
of Architects/CICA prize for best book of architectural criticism published
worldwide. His essay, “Underground and Overhead: Building the Analogous City,”
was included in the collection Variations on a Theme Park: The New American
City and the End of Public Space, named “One of the most important books of
1992" by the Voice Literary Supplement. His architectural criticism has
earned the Western Magazine Award for arts writing, and he was named co-winner
of the 2003 Jack Webster Journalism Award for civic reporting. He welcomes
comments at trevboddy@hotmail.com.

Vancouverism: High Density with Public Amenity: Developer Westbank Projects received extra density in return for such “social benefits” as the provision of public art, construction of a formal garden, and purchase of “heritage transfer rights.” Residences on Georgia, James K.M. Cheng Architect

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Vancouver Urban Design Guidelines: Built form policy on the downtown peninsular favors tall, skinny residential towers on continuous townhouse bases, wrapping from public lanes along the “long sides” of all streets. Extract from 1991 Downtown Plan, Tower Massing Flexibility illustration, courtesy City of Vancouver Planning Department

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Lower Manhattan’s Post 9/11 “Liberty Zone”: $1.6 billion of Liberty Bond financing was made available for “new rental housing” below Canal Street. The first few projects are now complete, including the Solaire and Verdisian (Albanese Organization Developers) in Battery Park, and 2 Gold Street (Rockrose Corporation)

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Vancouver’s Downtown Peninsula is North America’s highest density residential area at the center of its youngest major city. 90% of the towers in downtown Vancouver are residential, and planners are now worried that even more of its conventional office functions will leave because property taxes are much higher for businesses than residences (six times higher), and because economic returns are much richer for new condos than new offices (five times richer – one of the largest such skews anywhere)